


Roll Call

by Armaria



Category: Assassination Classroom, 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Assassination and Quirks, BAMF Midoriya Izuku, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Crack Treated Seriously, Multi, Other, Pop Culture, Quirk Analysis (My Hero Academia), Quirkless Midoriya Izuku
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-20
Packaged: 2021-03-22 10:53:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30037575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Armaria/pseuds/Armaria
Summary: In the middle of Apocalypse, Izuku showed up to school under his mother’s misguided intention that schools were still safe, only to learn that the hope of the world lay in the hands of Kunugigaoka Class 3-E.Later, it would become even more ironic that his new personal hope would be the omnipotent yellow monster that stole it from rest of the world.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 71





	1. Prologue: Time to Start

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [To Save the World](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17265155) by [taetaenoway](https://archiveofourown.org/users/taetaenoway/pseuds/taetaenoway). 



> Hi everyone! So, the Quirks in this fic are based on the Quirks made by taetaenoway, with kind permission! Enjoy! :D

In Izuku’s defence, he had gone in totally expecting it.

In the anonymous forums and rants that dotted the forums there too lay the things ‘without proof’ – the principal was secretly a villain, the school was meant as a feeder schools for tough-as-nails elites, Kunugigaoka’s End-Class system was one of the worst-kept secrets of education, and so on. As a Quirkless boy, Izuku had already expected to spend the last year of junior high floundering in increasingly hopeless dreams to become a Hero, especially in the wake of the Moon Disaster.

The perpetrator had given himself up afterwards. Standing in the middle of Chiyoda ward, he had waved tentacles at police officers and Pro Heroes queuing up with Quirk-suppressing cuffs, taken all the cuffs, and then stacked them on the scales of Lady Justice. The statue’s scales were as unmoving as the granite it was carved from, a gesture to an empty act of a society reeling from a Disaster when the foundations of their Safety had disappeared.

In the middle of Apocalypse, Izuku showed up to school under his mother’s misguided intention that schools were still safe, only to learn that the hope of the world lay in the hands of Kunugigaoka Class 3-E.

Later, it would become even more ironic that his new personal hope would be the omnipotent yellow monster that stole it from rest of the world.

Finally, in a stroke of irony so heavy that Hazama practically wrote a tell-all with that title, they accomplished the assassination for the price of 30 billion yen. There may or may not be inflation involved, yet in the end Izuku could not help but regard a briefcase full of cash that was only part of the payment, and think:

Blood money.


	2. Time for Class

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was hardly the Bakugou-free, hero-prepping schedule he had secretly hoped for in his life, but no one ever said life was predictable.

_Ratatatatatat_ -

“Good morning everyone! Just continue shooting while I take your attendance. Isogai-kun.”

“Here.”

“My apologies, the gunshots are too loud, please speak up.”

“Here!”

With shaking hands, wide eyes, and permanent bedhead caused by a nervous sleepless night lying awake, Izuku kept working the trigger of the plastic gun their stone-faced handler from the Ministry of Defence had distributed. It shot pink BB pellets at the yellow octopus responsible for destroying the Moon and with it, the era of Peace and All Might’s legacy.

So much for hoping that his luck had been left behind in Aldera Junior High School, when his mother moved him to Kunugigaoka with the rest of their lives.

Click-tat-click-tat-click-

_RATATATATATATATATAT—_

“Ow!” Izuku hissed as the trigger nicked his finger. Absently, he licked at it before his teeth clicked shut and he stared at All Might’s smiling band-aid neatly butterflied over the paper cut. Which had not been there a second before.

“Midoriya-kun, it’s not hygienic to lick your wounds.” The octopus then proceeded to pack up the toolbox-sized first-aid kit at Mach 20 while still dodging BB bullet hell.

“A- A- Ah yes!” Izuku’s spine went straight as the looming octopus stood before his desk… fizzling out of existence... “…Sensei?”

Behind him, a blonde girl in pigtails giggled, having just tossed an anti-Sensei knife through an afterimage and caused most of roll call to fade. “Aww, so cute~ if only it bled a bit more~”

“Toga-san.” A decisive tap of a pen sounded.

Roll call was still going on?!

“Here, Sensei~ What colour is your blood today?”

“Good question, Toga-san!” the yellow octopus sang. “You’ll have to try to find out, yes?”

When roll call ended, nobody had yet figured out within the surrounding piles of anti-Sensei BB pellets how to kill him.

* * *

“Oh, hello Izuku-kun!”

Izuku dropped the notebook in hand, thankfully not in his packed lunch. His wooden pencil was held in a knife-hold learnt from Karasuma-sensei, prepared to stake right through. “T- T- Toga-san… hello?”

“Ohh, you got more of Korosensei’s Quirks!” One pink tongue licked a sharp incisor. “Wanna know something in-te-res-ting~?”

Surely now, he would go the way of Yukimura-sensei. Their old homeroom teacher had disappeared on the night that Toga Himiko had transferred in, and the previous opinion across the class was that she had done in their teacher. Previous, since Toga had cleared herself with a ‘I haven’t even tasted Sensei’s blood yet!’. Kayano-san swore up and down that Toga had been drinking out a boy with a straw in a morgue the night that Yukimura-sensei disappeared. Judging by their new circumstances, Izuku was willing to bet that Toga-san would be winning that bounty before graduation if Karma-kun was not still on suspension.

“You tasted Sensei’s blood, Toga-san?” Izuku asked despite himself.

“Mmm~! It started like pomegranates, and then became so sweet like chocolate!” Insert sigh of regret. “Then it turned like blood, but it turned out that I licked my incisor too hard and cut my tongue~”

“Oh, that’s… terrible…but I remember you said your Quirk was activated by blood?” Izuku continued down the path of no return.

“Midoriya, you dog!” Maehara wolf whistled. “Lunch and a pretty girl!”

“Oi, don’t tease poor Midoriya-kun,” Okano smacked him on the back of the head, waving to Izuku. “Toga-san, don’t you have lunch?”

“Ah… don’t worry, I’m on a diet…”

There was a growl.

“……”

“I… don’t really want to be going to the cafeteria?” Himiko volunteered again, to be met with understanding nods. Besides the unrelenting mocking from the students of the main campus, by the time they ran down the mountain, bought something, and got back up, there was only time to scarf down a bread before afternoon classes started. Most of the class thus brought their own packed lunches or checked the menu for Home Economics.

“No, no, it’s not good for children to be starving.”

“So says the guy who went to China for mapo tofu—Oi! When did you come back!” Himiko did a double take where the giant yellow octopus had appeared, carrying a—

“…” Izuku rubbed his eyes, and blinked. “Sensei, is that… a missile?”

“Oh, yes, I brought it back as a souvenir in mid-air flight.” Koro-sensei’s tentacles turned into drills as other tentacles carried bowls of wet batter, eggs, and the octopus that their classmate Karma had been stabbing with an ice-pick for some reason related to torturing their teacher again. Himiko stared at the octopus bleeding blue.

“My duty as your teacher is to take care of you, Toga-san. Karma-kun,” he side-stepped the knife from behind, “your share is on your desk.”

Before long, a plate of takoyaki was laid out in Himiko’s frozen hands. Somehow, in the same second, she had also drawn her anti-Sensei knife and attempted to skewer the yellow octopus-man in the head.

“Hmm…” Himiko’s eyes lit up as she ate one ball skewered on the end of her anti-Sensei knife turned toothpick. “Izuku-kun, try this!”

“Er, I got lunch…”

“But it’s delicious!”

Eating takoyaki in between taking turns to stab at their teacher. Maybe at face value it would be the words of the insane, but this was Izuku’s life now.

* * *

** QUIRK ANALYSIS TO BEAT KOROSENSEI **

Name: Unknown, hereby ‘Korosensei’

Alias: Tentacle, Moon Disaster Criminal

Quirk: Undefined. Known abilities include:

  * Super-speed (top speed Mach 20, defined as 6,860 m/s) with accompanying powers to facilitate execution.
  * Invulnerable to most materials, exceptions include anti-Sensei material.
  * Tentacles (mutation quirk), possibly all muscular hydrostats upon analysis of visual similarities to octopi, each capable of independent action and high mitosis.
  * Regeneration
  * Colour change (mood sensitive, below is a diagram of observed patterns)



  * Super intelligence (academic, lingual, mathematical, economic, life-skills)



Weaknesses:

  * Anti-sensei material (Okuda-san’s Chemical Breakdown: elastomer-type polymer of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen; assembly and structure to be determined)



Other information:

  * Fixation on cleaning
  * Petty
  * A great teacher



* * *

“Oh, Midoriya-kun, you got a lot deeper than I thought!”

“N- Nagisa-kun,” Izuku jumped in his seat, seeing his classmate Nagisa peer at the stack of Campos-brand _Hero Analysis for the Future_ notebooks on his desk.

On the first day of transferring in with Karma-kun being in suspension at the time, the two wallflower boys had built up something like a analysis-filled friendship based on watching people.

At least, he had made one friend in this class. It was more than he had hoped.

“Korosensei is also weak to praise, so…”

“Nagisa-kun, have you come up with a way to kill him yet?”

Nagisa fiddled with the paper in his hands. “Well… Sugino tried to assassinate Korosensei with an anti-Sensei baseball this morning, but he hadn’t used his Quirk…”

“Energising, right?” Izuku nodded. “The basis of the Quirk is to fuel his own body’s energy into the inanimate object in contact, so that it increases. The primary motion is akin to a linear motor meant to catapult payloads at high speeds in a mass driver…”

“As expected of Midoriya-kun,” Nagisa murmured, taking notes. “You’ll definitely ace the Quirk classes.”

“Well, I like- what? _Quirk classes?!_ ”

Apparently, the assassination target had taken it upon himself to increase the difficulty of the assassination and noted that the students could use their Quirks. Which this resulted in the start of Quirk classes, and Karasuma-sensei batting up with asking if there were any volunteers willing to demonstrate their Quirk.

There was a beat… and another beat… and a third…

“Oh, fine,” Kayano came up, and made a vertical jump _waaaaay_ too high for any baseline human.

“My Quirk is Weight Control! I can control my own local gravity to make myself lighter! I can only reduce my weight to 1 kilogram though…” Kayano laughed to light applause.

Karasuma-sensei nodded, with no extra reaction on his face as he turned to the rest of the class. “Now, everyone, how would Kayano’s Quirk help with assassination?”

Heads swivelled to Izuku.

“Well… if Kayano-san can use it to make herself lighter then the rate of her falling would actually not kill her as compared to baseline humans.” Izuku detailed. “Weight is measured in newtons, but of we assume that Earth’s gravity is only reduced on Kayano-san as opposed to actually changing anything, she could tie herself to a big paraglider and snipe Koro-sensei from the air? There’s also the weight of the sniper rifle to be accounted for as well as the device itself…”

“Very good, Midoriya-kun,” Karasuma intervened. “Anyone else has an idea?”

“She could challenge him to a cake-eating contest and clean out his wallet!” Yada volunteered.

“My appetite is still normal, Yada-chan!” Kayano herself protested. “And what are we assassinating?!”

This was hardly the Bakugou-free, hero-prepping schedule he had secretly hoped for in his life, but no one ever said life was predictable.


	3. Time for Eating

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “2D is just fine,” someone muttered in the ensuing silence. “Real women don't need more dimensions than that.”

To the public, it looked like the Moon had cracked, the tides had receded, and the world was ending due to one person.

Which was pretty much why, for some strange reason, the actions of one person came up in Social Studies class…

Korosensei was lecturing: “…so Akechi Mitsuhide sieged Honnoji temple and Oda Nobunaga committed suicide, which also marks the rare case where the fire came from repelling outsiders as opposed to eliminate the traces of assassination…”

…never mind, this was the Assassination Classroom.

* * *

The person was, unexpectedly, Hazama.

In terms of class groupings, there was some overlap of functions within 3-E’s own cliques and duos. The class reps Kataoka and Isogai intersecting with the class’s unofficial leading trio of Karma, Nagisa and Kayano, for one.

Yet there were also periphery groups: the cool-headed partners Chiba and Hayami, the spectacles pair Okuda and Takebayashi, the social butterflies Okano, Maehara and Okajima, the Terasaka gang of mutation Quirks, and so on. With the absence of Kacchan to screw up his relationships and technically not admitting his lack of Quirk, plus the addition of the much scarier Toga, Izuku had found himself as part of a Data Duo with Nagisa and on arguably civil relations with everyone in class.

Izuku tended to keep away from the Terasaka gang, but their only girl Hazama had interesting views on literature.

“…there was a treasure guarded by a dragon. Many people tried to slay the dragon, but apparently none succeeded, even though some of them were very strong warriors. When the next man set off, he was secretly followed to see what would become of him. The dragon’s lair was lined with gold and gems, and when the man arrived he was able to slay the dragon with his sword. As he sat over the corpse, admiring the sparkling gems, he gradually began to grow scales, a tail, and horns, until he himself had become the dragon the villagers feared.”

A shadowy hand turned a page. “Some versions of the tale end happily, where the spy goes back, informs the nearest village, and the village rises to kill the monster permanently and throw the treasure into the sea. Midoriya…don’t you think that’s a boring ending?”

“Unless whoever kills Korosensei becomes the next Korosensei, I don’t think that’s exactly close to real life,” Izuku blurted. “Anyway, how would that Quirk transmit itself? By the act of murder does the Quirk Factor somehow-”

“I’m joking,” Hazama cut him off, giving him an intense look. “So, why approach me over lunch break? Could it be… you like-”

“A- Actually I wanted to ask you about your Quirk!” Izuku blurted. “See, you’re technically composed of shadows, but does it affect your volume?”

“…huh?”

“Er, well, as a person you’re 3D, so… could you change shape or press yourself into 2D?”

A muffled thump signalled someone dropping books in the now-silent classroom.

“2D is just fine,” someone muttered in the ensuing silence. “Real women don't need more dimensions than that.”

“ _Takebayashi, do you seriously want that to be your first line in this fic?!_ ”

Hazama opened her mouth, and paused, before her teeth clicked shut. “I want to say yes, but I honestly have had no reason to test that out. And…Midoriya.”

“Yes, Hazama-san?

“ _Never say that again._ ”

“Say what?” A voice piped up behind Izuku.

“T- Toga-san!” Izuku jumped on the spot as Himiko appeared behind him. “W- W-”

“Call me Hi~ mi~ ko~ Kira-chan~ I finished the novel I borrowed~”

“Oh, thanks, Himiko-chan.” Hazama took the book back, the gilt word _Carmilla_ faded from long thumbing. “It’s so hard to find an annotated translation nowadays. I’m surprised that we share similar tastes in reading material though!”

“En, we’re best reading buddies!” Himiko nodded, before her face clouded over. “But people always give me books like _Twilight_ that makes me wanna cut them up~”

“Parents are unreasonable,” Hazama agreed without missing a beat, or outright ignoring the implied threat. “The school library is limited, so if you can take more than paper books I recommend searching in the Blue Sky Library or getting a reader from Skydance.”[1]

“Really~?” Himiko stopped. “But it sounds expensive… I’ll just use my smartphone until I save up enough! But my allowance… I’ll ask Karasuma-sensei~”

Izuku blinked. “Eh?” He stared as Himiko ran out of the classroom.

“You two are _scary_ ,” Okajima remarked from the side-lines. “I mean, Toga’s pretty friendly, but…”

“Everyone says she sucked her last boyfriend’s blood with a _straw_.” The resident playboy Maehara shuddered. “

“Well at least she’s tidy about it,” Hazama commented, grinning. “Why? Maehara, are you _scared_?”

“If we ever broke up she would seriously stab me,” Maehara deadpanned.

“You’ll need to get together in the first place, and she’s still fixated on Midoriya.” The newcomer to their conversation, Karma patted Izuku on the shoulder. “Good luck in battle!”

“Why’d you make it sound like I’m walking into a battle of certain doom…?”

* * *

“Your stipend covers such items as necessary for your education,” Karasuma glanced up from his place at the teacher’s desk to Himiko. “Just give me the receipts when you get it. Although you have access to the Yucho account, and there’s enough funds.”

“Thanks, Sensei~!” Himiko spun on one foot. “Say~ I just need to kill the octopus to keep it, right~?”

“The emancipation as well as the expunction of your juvenile records will come on the success of the assassination.” Karasuma paused. “Of course, you are still welcomed to continue your employment with the Ministry of Defence.”

“You know, you’re not at all like the straight-lace types,” Himiko remarked, her voice dropping in pitch. “The Heroes would be arresting me already on sight.”

“…Toga, how much do you remember about law enforcement from Social Studies?”

“Er…” Toga frowned, and fidgeted.

“For Tokyo only,” Karasuma specified. “Next time if you forget you’re memorising the whole Code of Criminal Procedure.”

“Ahh!!!!” Himiko cringed. “For Tokyo… argh, Izuku-kun is so much better at this…what did he say? ‘The Public Security Bureau does investigation, and the Security Bureau does the actual policing, supervised by the National Police Agency, but in the rise of Quirks the actual enforcement of the law became dependent on Heroes as Quirk contractors. This is because, the Police Force did not want to weaponize Quirks and thus discriminate in accordance with Article Fourteen’-”

“Stop.” Karasuma held up a hand. “To summarise a long ramble from Midoriya’s mouth, the power to arrest lies only with the Police in the case where there is no crime in progress. Right now, you are not a wanted criminal. So no, the Heroes are not arresting anyone.”

“Yes…?” Himiko blinked.

“In your case, you were to _be_ arrested by Officer Kimura for the assault case at your last school, before a big yellow octopus crashed down from the skies after destroying the Moon, and your first reaction was to attack it, and tear off one tentacle with your teeth – the first injury that any single human has ever been seen to inflict without anti-Sensei material. That act of violence guaranteed your continued freedom and enrolment into this school as a temporary agent of DIH.”

Karasuma sighed. “As you are still a minor involved with this top-secret assassination, your guardianship falls with the agent in command – that is, me.”

Himiko pouted, but said nothing else.

“Anything _else_ to report?”

“The octopus cooked a blood pudding today for me~” A strange look came over Himiko’s face. “He’s a strange guy, but we’re all strange. Even you, Karasuma-sensei~ But I like him more than you~ I can smell the blood off him, he’s reeking of it, I can’t wait to cover him in blood~!!!”

“…you may _leave,_ Toga.”

* * *

**[1] Aozora Bunko is the Japanese analogue of Project Gutenberg. Skydance is another way to read Rakuten, which owns the Rakuten Kobo eBook store (also housed in Japan).**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Known Quirks  
> \- Sugino: Energising  
> \- Kayano: Weight Control  
> \- Hazama: Shadow


	4. Time for Analysis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Koro-Might~” Tentacles morphed to All Might’s cowlicks and features.

“I’m Irina Jelavić. Nice to meet you all!”

They had a new teacher.

They, the end-class 3-E, had a _new_ English teacher.

Izuku would have totally asked after homeroom and Korosensei was probably being seduced to his doom by a _very pretty_ teacher, except somehow Himiko and strangely Kayano-san had slapped one hand over one of his eyes each and started cursing the teacher’s boobs. It almost sounded like two female Kacchan clones, but Izuku kept that idea to himself.

“I have asked her to distract the octopus for the moment. Such a task is her speciality, so to speak, as a highly trained professional.” Karasuma informed the class later after the introduction.

“Izuku, you’re growing into a tomato!” Kayano-san was screaming. “Someone, our classmate’s gone _vegetative_!”

“Izuku-kun, don’t look!!!” Himiko looked ready to shiv their teacher, her eyes wide and manic in the rather eerie serial-killer look. Izuku knew because he could finally wrestle one hand off his face.

“I was… was…” Izuku looked away, blushing as he glanced around. Half the class was still conscious. Half, because the only ones _not_ looking at their new English teacher then was the girls, Karasuma-sensei, and Izuku who had his eyes blocked. Even Karma looked intrigued as she left in a cloud of perfume and hormones.

“Er, J- Ye- our new teacher has a pheromone Quirk right?” Izuku raised his hand. “Probably gender-based like the Pro Hero Midnight’s Quirk, in that it primarily affects men?”

“Was that why all the guys were out of it? It was kind of weird!” Okano commented. “Even Karma fell for it, and we all thought…” Her eyes darted from Karma to Nagisa, and she trailed off.

Karasuma coughed. “Apologies. Ms. Jelavić’s Quirk is Honeypot Trap. She can put off an aroma at her control, that puts any men in the surrounding area that smells it under a state in which they are completely entranced by her. It has no proven effects on women, however.”

Izuku looked down, shoulders trembling and unnoticed in the ensuing discussion.

“That must be tough for Korosensei,” Nagisa commented. “His nose is like a dog’s.”

“That and the boobs,” Maehara laughed. “We all know his type then!”

* * *

_IRINA JELAVIĆ_

_Alias: Bitch-neesan, Bitch-sensei, Ms Vitch (English class only)_

_Quirk: Honeypot Trap_

  * _Produces an aroma at her control, that puts any men in the surrounding area that smells it under a state in which they are completely entranced by her._
  * _No proven effects on women. Dependent on sense of smell (outlier 1 Karasuma-sensei was not affected much)_



_Questions:_

  * _Mechanism of Quirk dependent on smell → what about outlier 2?_
  * _Possible additional criteria from endocrine system?_
  * _Is variation of pheromone type possible? E.g., swarming, primer, territorial, trail?_



_Note: Possible for outlier 3 (Korosensei) to escape, unable to determine further information._

* * *

_Tap. Tap. Tap._

_Tap-tap-tap._

_Taptaptap_ -

“Midoriya-kun?” Nagisa finally asked the boy who had been vibrating in place since the start of break.

“Nagisa-kun…” Izuku fidgeted. “I’m not too sure how to ask this… about when you were kissed…”

“Please don’t bring up my humiliation again, Midoriya-kun,” Nagisa complained.

“…but I noticed that you weren’t quite so affected by her Quirk?” Izuku finished.

“Good question,” Nagisa considered. “I wonder…”

“Because… I couldn’t look away from her at all, but you managed it so easily, so I thought you had no sense of smell like Karasuma-sensei.” Izuku rattled off. “But after PE I noticed how indifferent you were to her proximity even after she French-kissed you in class, so I thought-”

“-that it had something to do with my Quirk,” Nagisa finished, earning a nod.

“Quirk?” An eavesdropping Nakamura blurted out. “Better than mine, being able to speak up to three different languages at a time. What’s your Quirk, Nagisa?”

“My quirk is called Misdirection,” Nagisa explained. “It’s basically made me easily forgettable, like a stagehand in a play. I, um…I’m still not entirely confident in how it functions.”

“My Quirk is an unstable variable,” Karma detailed at the next Quirk training class. “The events around me can tilt in my favour, but I can’t consciously activate or deactivate it.”

“…pull the other one,” Nakamura said in English at him in the ensuing silence. “It’s got bells on it.”

“Are we talking about Quirks again?” Maehara blurted out. “Oi, Midoriya, did you teach Hazama how to do that totally sick flattering move? She could totally match Okano in splits!”

“That was Hazama-san’s own work!” Izuku protested. “I just… asked a few questions…”

“Try mine!” Okajima blurted out.

“Oh… kay…?” Izuku got his notebook.

“My Quirk is called Snapshot,” Okajima declared. “It allows me to freeze the area in a thirty-metre radius for one second.”

“AND YOU HAVEN’T USED IT YET?” came his classmates’ reaction.

Even Karma gave a groan. “Okajima, yo, my man. You can keep Korosensei from _moving_ , and you didn’t feel the need to share this with us?”

“What is _wrong_ with you?” Fuwa chipped in, tossing aside the light novel she had been reading. It featured another cute-faced girl, as usual.

In the face of the wave of assassin-classmates closing ranks, Okajima held up both hands in a fruitless gesture of surrender. “It’s only for one second! Besides, all of you would be frozen too. I’d have to be the one to stab him, and I’m not Karasuma-sensei.”

“Why not shoot him then? A bullet would be enough,” from the side-lines, even Chiba and Hayami were giving their own two cents.

“It’s an area-effect Quirk, so once the bullet leaves the chamber and I’m not in contact, it freezes like everything else,” Okajima elaborated.

“So, it’s a localised area freeze, where only you, the user, can move and presumably see, which implies a form of time-freezing that does not exclude light,” Izuku put together. “So… we’ll need Korosensei, Okuda-san, Takebayashi-san for the next phase.”

“Did someone say my name? Never fear, for I am here!”

Izuku jumped in his hunched scribbling, as he turned towards the All Might-like declarer―

“Koro-Might~” Tentacles morphed to All Might’s cowlicks and features.

“…

“..

“.

Izuku stared at him. And smiled.

“AHHH! I got it, I got it, Midoriya-kun! No more copying All Might! I’ll leave your idol alone, stop smiling! I got nightmares!”

“Izuku-kun~” Himiko swooned, and fainted with a thump. Nobody noticed.

* * *

“And this information is for your notebook?” Irina Jelavić, newly christened Bitch-sensei by the class, regarded the green gremlin that had come to the teachers’ office after classes. Somehow, behind him loomed one of the plainer guys, pinned by one glaring Toga Himiko at the door of said office.

“Yep!” Said the green gremlin in awkward English. “I saw… once you were revealed your…calm? Went down, which means that Ms Jelavić you’re more... specced? To… men?”

Bitch-sensei put her face in her hands, as if facing a horror story from her past. Then she looked up again with a glare. “Okay… yes, I’m a honeypot assassin, my whole point is to kill men. I failed with your homeroom teacher and your class mainly because Karasuma warned everyone, and they’ve been breaking out the citronella oil with bugs as an excuse! Any point in saying that? In Japanese,” she corrected.

“Oh! Er, because you can control the rate and concentration of your hormones so I was wondering if you could also influence the type of hormones produced, which would give you versatility in fighting women or even transgender people in theory but no study I could find has actually isolated true human sex pheromones and thus _et cetera et cetera-_ ”

Karasuma blinked as she stumbled out of the room after that, still shell-shocked. “I see you’ve met our resident Quirk analyst.”

“The kid is Quirkless?” she muttered, playing with the filigree Zippo-style lighter in her hands. “Could’ve sworn it was an intelligence Quirk. How did he end up… _here_?” By heroic effort she managed to avoid insulting Class 3-E again.

“He’s Quirkless.”

“Ah…” came the sigh of understanding. “So, all of that analysis is natural…?”

Karasuma hummed. “Putting aside the lack of a Quirk, and the polish needed in his education in terms of capability, he’s naturally smart, and he can handle Toga. His background checks out ― there’s only one mother in the picture. But…”

“But none of that would matter if the world would end next March.” Her lips thinned, as if the assassin behind the mask of her face was calculating the next move. “The Octopus would usually be handled as a Villain, but considering the scale of the damage plus the target’s evasive capabilities, it would be harder to corral the Heroes of several countries to establish an effective threat. Additionally, the gatherings of Heroes across international borders tends to…create some _interesting_ jurisdictional challenges.”

“You would know.” Karasuma murmured. He was right; she had lived through one such thing, after all.

“As children we love heroes, as adults we understand villains. While the children of society look up to heroes, the adults in government understand where it builds up, and have to prepare for when the waltz ends.”

A strange look came over Irina’s eyes. “You never appreciate peace until it’s too late.”


End file.
